20th Century

The heir to the Habsburg throne visited Bosnia on the anniversary of the Kosovo battle with his wife Sophie. Members of Young Bosn...

Rasputin, a Siberian peasant healer, gained the confidence of Nicholas and Alexandra through his apparent ability to ease the hemo...

Collins, architect of the IRA guerrilla campaign and chairman of the provisional government that accepted the Anglo-Irish Treaty, ...

Narutowicz, a professor of engineering and foreign minister, was elected president by the national assembly with the votes of the ...

Doumer, a veteran republican of the Dreyfus era, governor of Indochina and finance minister, was elected president in 1931 and pre...

Alexander, the warrior king who had made himself dictator after the parliament crisis of 1929, arrived in France to strengthen the...

Zangara, an unemployed Italian immigrant bricklayer with chronic stomach pain and a generalized hatred of rulers, stood on a wobbl...

Dollfuss, leader of the Christian Social Party, had crushed the socialist Schutzbund in the February fighting of 1934 and governed...

Asanuma, chairman of the Japan Socialist Party and leader of the opposition, was famous for vigorous oratory and for a 1959 Beijin...

Count Bernadotte, Swedish diplomat and president of the Swedish Red Cross, had negotiated the release of thousands of prisoners fr...

Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office, chaired the Wannsee conference that coordinated the genocide of the European Jew...

Trotsky, co-leader of October 1917 and founder of the Red Army, had been expelled by Stalin, deported, and hunted across the world...

Gandhi had led India to independence through satyagraha, and in the dawn of that independence was fasting against the communal sla...

Faisal II, young king under the regency and then rule shadowed by his uncle the crown prince Abd al-Ilah and prime minister Nuri a...

Abdullah, who had led the Arab Legion into Palestine in 1948 and annexed the West Bank, was suspected by Palestinian nationalists ...

Olympio, an economist trained in the City of London, had led Togo to independence from French trusteeship in 1960 as a genuine mul...

Castillo Armas, an army colonel, had been chosen by the CIA operation PBSUCCESS to lead the invasion force that overthrew the elec...

Lumumba, the trade unionist who led the Congo to independence in June 1960 within months of release from prison, broke with Belgiu...

Trujillo had ruled the Dominican Republic since 1930 through terror, cult, and ownership of half the economy, naming the capital a...

Riding through Dealey Plaza in an open limousine, Kennedy was struck by rifle fire from the Texas School Book Depository; he died ...

Evers, a war veteran and Mississippi first NAACP field secretary, organized boycotts and investigated killings, including the Emme...

Malcolm X, the most electrifying voice of Black nationalism, had left the Nation of Islam in March 1964, made the pilgrimage to Me...

Diem, the Catholic mandarin president backed by Washington since 1955, had lost Buddhist support after the Thich Quang Duc self-im...

King had come to Memphis to support the striking sanitation workers amid his Poor People Campaign. A single rifle shot from a room...

Kennedy, the attorney general of his brother administration and senator from New York, had entered the 1968 race after Eugene McCa...

Mondlane, a Mozambican of Tsonga background who had studied in the United States on missionary scholarships, earning a doctorate a...

Cabral, an agronomist trained in Lisbon, founded the PAIGC and led the most successful guerrilla war against Portugal in Guinea-Bi...

Verwoerd, prime minister since 1958 and former minister of native affairs, was the chief theoretician of grand apartheid, the arch...

Moscone, a liberal state senator turned mayor, had decided not to reappoint the resigned conservative supervisor Dan White to the ...

Milk, a camera store owner turned Castro district organizer, won a supervisor seat in 1977 after three attempts, becoming one of t...

Neave, a lawyer and wartime escaper of Colditz who had interrogated at Nuremberg, managed Margaret Thatcher leadership campaign an...

Mountbatten, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, the war hero who had supervised the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947 and later s...

Moro, the Christian Democrat statesman who had engineered the historic compromise with the Communist Party, was kidnapped on 16 Ma...

Park, the general who seized power in 1961 and drove the industrial miracle while strangling dissent under the Yushin constitution...

Sadat, who had launched the 1973 crossing of the canal and then traveled to Jerusalem in 1977 for the Camp David peace, faced conv...

Gandhi, daughter of Nehru and prime minister for most of the years since 1966, had ordered the army into the Golden Temple in June...

Palme, the Social Democratic prime minister of Sweden and international voice of the nonaligned, disarmament, and anti-apartheid c...

Markov, a Bulgarian writer and broadcaster whose critical essays on Radio Free Europe and the BBC infuriated the Zhivkov regime, f...

First, journalist, historian, and author of books on Libya, the Mozambican revolution, and the mining economy, had been imprisoned...

Biko, the medical student who founded the South African Students Organization and built Black Consciousness as the philosophy of s...

Premadasa, the first head of state from the lower urban castes, had risen from municipal politics through the UNP to the presidenc...

Hani, the popular general secretary of the Communist Party and former MK commander, was the second most admired figure in the coun...

Rabin, the soldier of the 1948 war and 1967 victory turned diplomat of Oslo, had signed the agreement with Arafat and King Hussein...

Lennon, the most politically audible of the Beatles and a New Yorker of five years, was returning from a recording session at nigh...

Ito Hirobumi was the leading statesman of Meiji Japan, the first Prime Minister of Japan, serving four terms, and the principal au...

Pyotr Stolypin was Prime Minister of Russia from 1906, combining harsh repression of the revolutionary movement after 1905 with am...

Francisco Madero, a wealthy landowner from Coahuila, launched the Mexican Revolution in 1910 with the Plan of San Luis Potosi agai...

Jean Jaures was the leading figure of French socialism, founder of the newspaper L Humanite, and a celebrated orator who helped un...

Rosa Luxemburg, born in Russian Poland, was a leading Marxist theorist and economist and a prominent opponent of World War I, whic...

Emiliano Zapata led the peasant army of the south during the Mexican Revolution, fighting successive governments for the return of...

Walther Rathenau, an industrialist who led the electrical company AEG, organized the supply of raw materials for Germany during Wo...

Inukai Tsuyoshi was a veteran liberal politician who became Prime Minister of Japan in December 1931 at the age of seventy-six. He...

Huey Long, known as the Kingfish, dominated Louisiana as governor and then as a United States senator, building roads, schools, an...

Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was a populist leader of the Colombian Liberal Party, a powerful orator who attacked the oligarchy of both tr...

Liaquat Ali Khan was a leading figure of the All-India Muslim League and the closest lieutenant of Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the move...

Faisal bin Abdulaziz became king in 1964 after the deposition of his brother Saud and pursued cautious modernization, expanding ed...

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, called Bangabandhu or friend of Bengal, led the Awami League and the movement for autonomy of East Pakistan...

Oscar Romero was appointed Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977 and was considered a cautious conservative, but the murder of his fr...

Benigno Ninoy Aquino Jr. was the leading opposition politician in the Philippines and a likely presidential candidate before Marco...

Thomas Sankara, an army captain, came to power in Upper Volta in 1983 and renamed the country Burkina Faso, land of upright people...

Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister of India in 1984 after the assassination of his mother Indira Gandhi and led the Congress Party...